Blaming it on the Russians

I long ago came to the conclusion that the Second World War would never
have happened if the Soviet Union had been less aggressive. Now, in
The Russian
Origins of the First World War, Sean McKeekin makes essentially
the same argument about the Great War that preceded it (and that in
many ways laid the foundations for it). His is particularly interested
in the role played by the Ottoman Empire, whose land was coveted
by Russia (which wanted Constantinople especially), France (Lebanon),
and Britain (Palestine). This focus is explained by his position on
the faculty at Turkey's Bilkent University.

"The war of 1914
was Russia's war even more than it was Germany's."
p.5 Argues that it was Russia that mobilized first,
forcing Germany to follow.

"Poland was the suppurating wound of Russian
military planning, subject of hundreds of anxious analyses and endless
war gaming." Speaks of Russian Poland as a "salient," vulnerable to the
German and Austrian empires on the north, west, and south, "its flanks
undefended by natural frontiers." p.19

"To assume that Russia really went to war on
behalf of Serbia in 1914 is naive." p.27

As Germany increased its presence in Turkey,
"Russia was now faced with the frightening prospect that her most
powerful enemy would soon possess a chokehold at the Straits
over her export economy, on which depended everything else." p.30

Started out well enough. Russians moved into
Galicia. Occupied Lemberg/Lwow on 2 Sep 1914, "and a general
Austro-Hungarian retreat began...." This had the effect of fattening
the "salient." p.85 These gains would be reversed when the Germans reinforced
the eastern front in 1915 and drove the Russians back.

But Russia's major interests lay to the
south. Turkey and Persia (Iran) were "the primary arena of Russian
imperial ambitions." p.101

The Gallipoli campaign: "Misdirected pity
born of the Russian Revolution has militated against condemnations of
Russia's opportunism and passivity by most French and British authors."
p.141

Eastern Anatolia "was on a permament war
footing long before 1914." p.147

"... the loss of Poland in 1915, despite the
initial panic, had not been an unmitigated disaster for Russia."p.215 "Even
before the Germans occupied Warsaw in August 1915, [Sergei Sazonov,
the Russian foreign minister] had cooled
down considerably in his rhetoric. Disappointing Polish nationalists who
viewed him as an ally, Sazonov emphasized that Eastern Galicia would
never be included in any future Polish kingdom." p.216

"Whether Poland
would be ruled by Petrograd or Berlin was, it seemed, less important to
Russia's war aims than the 'fundamental axiom' that postwar Poland not
be independent." p.216

"The bamboozlement of the British by clever
Russian diplomats [with respect to getting them to doing the heavy lifting
at Gallipoli and elsewhere] has much relevance for our own age." An
autocracy always has the advantage over a democracy in such matters.

"It is high timed that Russia, too, receive
its fair share of scrutiny for its role in unleashing the terrible
European war of 1914, and for helping spread the war into the Middle
East. Neither a deliberate German plot nor an avoidable accident, the
First World War was the inexorable culmination of a burgeoning rivalry
between Wilhelmine Germany and tsarist Russia in the Near East, each
lured in its own way down the dangerous path of expansionism by the
decline of Ottoman power. In the end the war destroyed both regimes,
though this was little consolation to the millions who died in it--or
the millions more who perished in the Russian Revolution, the Second
World War, and other conflicts born out of the wreckage of the First."
p.243